Archipelago of Souls Read online

  About Archipelago of Souls

  In the aftermath of the Second World War, an Australian soldier, Wesley Cress, a hero of the underground resistance on German-occupied Crete, seeks solace and comfort on King Island, in the mouth of Bass Strait, in the Roaring Forties latitude of the Southern Ocean.

  Wesley carries in his heart the infernal story of the Battle of Crete, the disappearance of his brother in the ensuing evacuation, and the hellish journey he was forced to take after he was left behind on the ancient island.

  When he meets Leonie Fermoy, the granddaughter of an American whaler with her own nightmares, the private and the public battles of their post-war worlds begin to fuse. Through the agency of John Lascelles – the unassuming postmaster on the island and a crusader for the rights of returned soldiers – Wes and Leonie attempt to negotiate a future in which love can prevail in a morally devastated world.

  Archipelago of Souls is a novel exploring the difficult realities of nationhood, war, morality and love. Compelling and beautifully realised, it is about the creation of identity, the enigmas of memory and the power of the written word to heal the deepest wounds.

  Contents

  Cover

  About Archipelago of Souls

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Days of Butterflies

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Part Two: Fire in the Cave

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Part Three: Death of the Virgin

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Part Four: Catch Me Alive

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Author Note

  About Gregory Day

  Also by Gregory Day

  Copyright page

  for the hidden ones

  Alone is the swallow and costly the spring

  For the sun to turn it takes a lot of work

  It takes a thousand dead sweating at the wheels

  It takes the living also shedding their blood

  Odysseus Elytis

  One

  Days of Butterflies

  I

  Beneath sheoaks on a slope on a hill overlooking Bass Strait is the grave of John Lascelles, a man commonly thought of by the people of this island as the finest you’d ever be likely to meet. It’s pretty amusing that for so many years I would have been the last person to reckon that of him and that it fell to myself and Leonie in the end to bury him, but bury him we did, not with full military honours as he may have dreamt, but with a typically odds and sods gathering of people who’d known him both short and long, and who respected him with a deep though often dry-witted affection. Some placed wattle boughs in his grave, some stepped forward to whisper a few words, others offered the traditional hand of ground. Leonie threw in a nectarine. Lascelles would always bring a delicious offering from his garden when he visited us in the warmer months; and believe you me, growing stone fruit is not always an easy task in the weather we get out here on King.

  For myself, I posted a letter into his grave; well, a sealed package actually, addressed in cuttlefish ink containing events and feelings written in the same. These were the last of the pages I’d written many years before to Leonie, and which, like all the others, I’d planned for Lascelles to personally make sure she received. They were pages no one bar Leonie was ever to read, pages I know Lascelles himself would certainly have loved to have seen, but which I’d stubbornly refused to show him. Mind you, I did very nearly paraphrase their contents one night over dinner here at Naracoopa, in the pleasurable years of my final thaw, when I no longer saw him as a phoney or a threat, but as a kind-hearted and doggedly loyal friend of above-average intelligence. But no, I could never bring myself to do it, to share with him the words as I’d written them down, in the packages I’d sent through to Leonie with his assistance in those days after the war when he and his father ran the post office. And even Leonie didn’t know for sure that the last package had survived, for I’d held it close since the day it had come back into my possession, like a good luck charm, it being the only one that hadn’t gone up in the fire at Wait-a-While.

  That’s where we buried Lascelles, on the block at Wait-a-While, on the levelled site of my old hut, and right alongside the plots where Leonie and myself will eventually be lowered down. I caught sight of her face on the other side of the grave, her skin ghastly white with the easterly and the sadness of it all. She was facing into the molten glare of the water far below but looked down at the open soil as the package fluttered out from my hand. She’d recognise it anywhere, I knew she would even after all these years, and I saw the surprise in her face as it dropped in a slant and then seemed to hover for a moment, before landing with a light thsk onto Lascelles’ coffin lid.

  With respect to gossip on the island, I was thankful that the envelope landed sender upwards, with only my own name in my younger hand legible to the sky and the eyes around, though you would have had to be really looking. People have joked to me since that I needn’t have put a sender’s address on a letter to a dead man and I’ve laughed along with them, relieved at what other story they might have drummed up if the package had twisted the other way and landed with Leonie’s name face up. Oh, I can imagine the conclusions they may have come to, about the frustrated passion Lascelles had for her and how the only evidence of it would be buried with him. Yes, I can well imagine some of them thinking that. Especially given how close the three of us eventually became and also given the fact that Lascelles had never married. But they would have been wrong. It was a lucky turn for us all that Lascelles, whose life was so pure and thoughtful, died without any hint of such a scandal, though even if he had it may not have phased me, given my own betrayals, and those of others against me, which have so directed the course of my life.

  The last time I saw Lascelles alive he’d parked his Cortina back near the jetty and walked the rest. Trying to keep his old body fit. He seemed healthy enough when he showed, his colour was good, and he propped on the couch in his customary green slicker and cords with his pipe and a mug of coffee. As I remember it we had a pleasant chat, mainly about rumours of the scheelite mine re-opening, but when he left and I watched him walking back out across the grass in the direction of his car there was something in the quality of his solitude that caught my attention. Dear old Lascelles. The colours around little Councillor Island in the bay beyond were switching off and on under cloud. Silver, blue-black, green. As usual his tread was tentative – it took me years to realise it was due to the sheer size and openness of his brain that he walked the earth, even in peacetime, as if it was a minefield – but as I watched him go the whole atmosphere of sky and sea seemed
to adjust its curvature and hover auspiciously around him. When two days later I found him slumped on his old back porch above the harbour in Currie, with a cold pot of tea, a fallen book, and a honey sandwich covered with ants at his side, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We are all getting on after all. What rocked me was not so much that he had died, but rather the fact that I, due to the last persistent residue of an obstinate ocker pride, had withheld so long from him the one vindication he so richly deserved.

  Leonie and I felt his loss greatly, although I, unlike her, felt it guiltily also. I recalled the day years before when Lascelles first came to visit Naracoopa on his father’s shiny old Velocette. We sat out on the garden bench near the rows of agapanthus (they’re all gone now), he with his post-office visor still on his head, and he lit his pipe. The thought of what I could have said to him then, and didn’t, is a part, I s’pose, of the engine that drives my pen across this page. The good-natured man had built an official RSL Memorial Reading Room on the island and nobody used it. He spent his time off from the post office alone in that reading room, dusting the shelves, writing away on letterhead for new catalogues, unit histories, personal memoirs, photographic records; listening out for a footfall. His benign dream, his theory, that diggers needed healing, time to nurture their scars by reading and writing in order to reflect on the trials of their wars, was seemingly disproven. Time and again he watched the King Island SS – my cheeky name for the soldier settlers – trudge past through the squalls to the pub or the club. To drink. To bend their memories with beer and away from vexation. Lascelles knew that theirs was a version of the talking cure. Only it was self-medication. The shrink was no one specific, just any ear who’d listen – not to the gangrenous facts of the jungle or Tobruk, but to the avoiding of them.

  Yet out on the east side of the island, here was I, Wesley Cress, a living testament to the rightness of Lascelles’ theory. And this is what I withheld from him. What I couldn’t say. How he had unknowingly filled my life with love. I can see his discomfort on that day near the agapanthus, as he sat fiddling with his pipe. I can almost see the thoughts in his mind, like a slide show whirring, clanking, re-arranging. I can remember my own thoughts too, that his problem was – there was nothing he could ever do about it – that he never saw action. Simple as that. His keenness and curiosity about anything to do with the war used to cheese me off, though eventually I learnt to have a laugh, even at the thought of it. He would always narrow his eyes when I did that, as if to ask indignantly: ‘What?’ But in my weakness I could never say, and all I can think now is how sad it was that something inside of him still envied me my burden.

  I crunch the last of my breakfast toast between my teeth and leave the kitchen saying I’ve gotta set the record straight. Leonie says from where she’s reading the newspaper at the table, ‘the record’s never straight’, and before I’ve even had a chance to walk the gravel path I’ve been sent way out towards an ever-receding horizon. Truth, by its nature, cannot be clean and straight. It is not the events or the memories of the events creating my condition but the conditions of this island creating them. The life we’ve lived since the war. The two islands I inhabit. And I’ll say in reply, ‘ex nihilo?’ She’ll nod. Our little erudite joke in my schoolboy Latin. Out of nothing?

  Nothing comes out of nothing.

  So I walk the gravel path looking straight ahead at nothing. Out over the grass, over the narrow road, the rocks, the sand, out across the ocean. If there’s a cargo tramp or a crayboat there I hardly see it. And when I turn with the curl of the path, flick that latch and walk through the bungalow door I somehow think of Captain John Pendlebury doing the same. As the heat rose back in ’41. Entering his messy office in Iraklion. Picking up his glass eye from where he left it on the desk and calmly inserting it back into its socket.

  II

  During the slaughter, the screaming days when the German pilots would use the piercing sirens fixed to the undersides of their fuselages to rattle us – quite aside from the terror of the bombs – we treated a little house just south of the Iraklio airfield as a hospital, a hotel, and a church. Uncle Tassos our host would say to me, as we hauled in the wounded, ‘Mister Wesley Cress you are making the mountains of Kriti burst with wildflowers.’ Or he would shout to Vern, above the strafing in the air, ‘Mister Vernon Cress, your family are forever welcome here.’ Once, as we sat out in the courtyard under his trellised vines at dawn, having endured a terrible night of bleeding and inadequacy as Ken Callinan gave up the ghost, Uncle Tassos said: ‘You brothers and your friends are here with us for all time. The living and the dead. We are all brothers now. Do you understand?’

  Even before we got onto the island we’d had a terrible time. Outnumbered by German and Italian forces on the Greek mainland we’d been forced into a ragtag retreat south after a ferocious and freezing Easter at a place called Vevi. Our instructions when they came were to get to Crete. On any boat we could find. When finally our little band of stragglers, myself, my brother Vern, Mug Wylie and Ken, gangplanked on the island at Souda Bay, we were exhausted. We were told to expect local attention and to respect it as our ally and by the time we’d hauled our kits from Souda across the north coast to join our unit at Iraklio we’d learnt it wasn’t so difficult to do so. The very next day, after our first fair dinkum sleep in a while, the four of us wandered off from the unit camp for a look-see. As it happens Tassos had sent his niece Adrasteia to pick two or three of us out for his own purposes, any two or three would do.

  We all saw her coming, the dust in her dress and bare feet, her hair stowed away but her brown arm brandishing two plump chooks in our direction. We licked our lips. I took the chooks from her but handed them straight to Vern and he to Ken and then to Mug. Pass the chook, we joked, embarrassed by her beauty. And then she took them back from Mug and we followed her – how could we not? – for at least a half an hour along a creek bed and up a ridge of olive tree rows to the house.

  Any one of us could have rung the necks of the chooks that day but we chose Mug to do the honours. He politely stepped outside the rough courtyard wall of the villa and up onto the little dirt lane amongst the oleanders. Started to rip into it. Feathers went everywhere, floating up in the sea-breeze above the wall. Uncle Tassos was impressed. He had good English from labouring on the nearby archaeological digs at Knossos but showed us he liked the way we dealt with the bird by smiling and wringing an imaginary neck in the air with his hands. Then, when Mug had finished, he started to talk. To begin our education.

  He told us about their island boys, the Cretan unit of the Greek army, how they were stranded up on the Albanian border leaving Crete to fend for itself, without the prime of its fighting youth. Then he went on about an archaeologist named Pendlebury, a Pom – ‘Mister John’ he called him – a captain and a friend, who spoke all of Kriti’s dialects. He told us how far this Mister John had walked, before the war, from east to west over the island’s four high massifs. He laughed as he drew quite the figure for us: a tall Englishman, with a glass eye from a childhood accident, travelling on foot, with a katsounas, a shepherd’s crook, in pursuit of romantic adventure and Minoan shards. Now, according to Tassos, Pendlebury was plying the same high plateaus and snowy passes, the cut gorges and barren southern shores to anticipate the Germans by preparing resistance networks. To link hundreds of small villages in the mountains with the villages of the coasts, to set up signalling patterns and strategies, lines of communication, and also to coordinate heavy work like hefting boulders onto potential landing areas to obstruct German aircraft. So Kriti would be ready when the Nazis came. ‘And she will,’ said Tassos, giving us a defiant stare.

  Tassos had a big beak, and long thick side whiskers of salt and pepper that seemed to stand to attention as we talked to him, particularly Vern, in the rough-as-guts Greek he’d learnt out on the farm alone when we were kids. Some of what he’d learnt had paid dividends for us only a couple of weeks bef
ore at Vevi, when he’d come up with a nickname for the Italian soldiers – makaroniades – and as we’d fallen back into the chaos of our retreat the locals just fell about laughing at the joke. Now, in easier circumstances, Vern’s gifts were impressing our Cretan host. Uncle Tassos kept correcting Vern’s scraps of Greek, converting them into his dialect, but his black eyes were wet with pleasure, his whiskers bristling with excited sociability, and meanwhile Adrasteia kept shimmying in and out through the door in the courtyard wall, with vegetables and a copper pot she was filling with the feathers Mug had scattered in the street.

  Of course we’d all fallen for her but Vern took the inside running when the pot of feathers she was carrying changed later on to a heavy load of juniper logs. He didn’t exactly have his tongue hanging out but, by the look on her face as he held out his hands to help her, she thought he was a try-hard. I dunno, maybe his mangled, patched-together Greek sounded pathetic and Tassos had only been polite because he knew he could use him. Well, an ordinary shitkicker Vern definitely wasn’t, yet as he put out his arms to receive her basket she handed it over with an astonishingly assertive look. Then, quick as the wind, as soon as she’d handed over the basket, her expression changed to one of pure play and amusement.

  In the courtyard we roasted the two plump chooks on the juniper fire. What a lark! Sitting under Uncle Tassos’ vines it seemed some kind of miracle that Vern, myself, Ken and Mug had found a local enclave. An island within the island. A clear pause. A place where we could remember normal things, like the feeling of a full belly and the relief of the sun in our bones.

  *

  The Kiwi General, Tiny Freyberg, was in charge of our Cretan forces and day by day he folded his huge burly frame into a jeep to visit the units scattered across the north coast to the west and east of Souda. Our bush scholar Vern gave us the heads up that Tiny Freyberg was not your average type of Kiwi, not even your average general. He’d been a hero of the first war but even more than that he had certain flash associations. For instance, the best man at his wedding was Peter Pan, or at least the fella who’d written the book.